


we'll make it work out

by Tobiko



Series: Welters 2018 [3]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: They're a mess, if there's no specified relationship in a loop you can honestly just insert whatever and it'll work, no set relationships across all loops really, they've all banged
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 04:39:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14663490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tobiko/pseuds/Tobiko
Summary: They've been on this ride 39 times. Jane Chatwin is doing her best.





	we'll make it work out

1

Jane Chatwin doesn’t know Quentin Coldwater from Adam. Quentin and Julia go to Brakebills and are carefree and unaware of the true dangers of magic. Q moves into the Physical Cottage, Julia moves above the Library. They are at Brakebills for two and a half years, learning and partying and happy.

When the brown outs start, Quentin does research. He finds Fillory. He brings his friends, Julia, Alice, Penny, and two of his friends who had graduated the year before Eliot and Margo.

They die.

Jane feels bad for them. They’d actually come pretty close to helping her with her Martin problem. She resets time for them, because it’s the only gratitude she can express.

2

Quentin shows up again in Fillory. Jane is astounded.

He doesn’t bring Alice this time, but he brings everyone else. Alice apparently Niffined out trying to save her brother.

They don’t get as close to defeating Martin this time. They’re wiped out pretty quick. Jane resets.

3

Quentin comes a third time. Jane doesn’t know how it’s possible, but it keeps happening. She waits, she watches.

Quentin, Eliot, Margo, and Julia are crowned Kings and Queens of Fillory. Martin mows them down.

Jane resets and waits to see what happens.

4

When Quentin shows up the fourth time, Jane knows it’s not just a fluke.

She introduces herself to Quentin and tells him what’s been going on. Tells his friends.

Somehow, this makes him die sooner. He goes charging in, and she realizes he can’t know. He’s made more progress without her telling them outright what had been happening.

5

Jane fiddles. She tries to introduce Quentin to magic earlier. He’s gifted, but still not in the way that Alice and Julia are. Even with years more practice, he doesn’t hold a candle to those two. 

They almost make it. But then Penny goes a bit mad, and Alice has to kill him. They lose shortly after.

So not that. 

6 

Jane tries shoving them all into Fillory early, not letting them find it on their own.

Julia becomes a druid by accident. Margo nearly marries a bear. Eliot falls down the same well she did and winds up 20 years in the past of Fillory. Alice and Q get married by a sloth. It’s all a fucking mess.

When Martin comes for them, Fillory burns.

7

Alice Niffins again when Jane pushes something too far, and then a girl named Kady shows up in the group. It’s the first time Jane remembers her being around, though with other things going on she might have been doing stuff at Brakebills that Jane hadn’t noticed.

Kady comes to Fillory and she’s a bit of a distraction to Julia and Penny. Her battle magic skills does not outweigh the cost of losing Julia and Penny early to heroic sacrifices. Something to watch for.

8

Jane hates it when she realizes their stupid melodramatic relationship statuses influences how things play out.

They’re all a mess and they all sleep with one another.

Quentin and Alice always wind up together, in one form or another. Whether their relationship sticks depends on Quentin’s relationship with Eliot (and sometimes Margo), and Alice’s relationship to Julia (and also Margo???). Then there’s the Penny and Julia and Kady situation.

It’s all messy and useless, but fuck they’re just children. And they’re Jane’s best shot.

This one Julia jumps in front of Quentin and is obliterated, and Quentin loses his mind.

9

Making sure Alice doesn’t Niffin is important, because she’s their most skilled Magician. Jane tries to save Charlie in this one.

Charlie apparently is destined to Niffin, though, because he does another way.

This time his Niffin takes nearly half the school with him. That won’t do. 

10 

Jane doesn’t know what she changed to make Margo “Janet”, but Janet isn’t much different than Margo anyway. 

11

Jane tries to keep Quentin’s parents together in this one.

Quentin’s depression is slightly better managed, but his home life is a train wreck. He winds up more like Alice, which is no good.

12

Jane tries fiddling with Eliot’s family next. They’re god awful. Eliot is only slightly better functioning.

13 

Fiddling with Julia’s family makes her worse, somehow. Perhaps not a good idea to mess with the delicate balance there.

14

It’s curious, that no matter what Jane tries, Penny’s life remains largely unchanged. Things just shift to accommodate her changes. Penny always comes out nearly the same until he goes to Brakebills, and that’s where the determining changes to his personality take place. Usually depended on how his relationship with Julia does or does not go.

15 

Dean Fogg demands answers. She gives them, finally. He’s lived through enough loops to be a miserable.

He suggests more individual training in their Disciplines. They try that.

Doesn’t help at all.

16 

Kady shows up again in this one. She and Penny save Victoria and then bail.

Things go to shit quickly after that.

17 

Quentin and Eliot are the last to survive, and they nearly make it due to a sacrifice Julia and Margo made for them.

They decide unanimously that they’d rather reset the loop than live without their girls.

Jane is furious.

18 

For this one, Jane tries to take Margo out of the equation. A little vindictive, maybe, but the last loop might have worked. 

Eliot overdoses his first year. 

19 

Maybe a wedge between Q and Julia, then.

She can’t even manage to make much of a dent. They bounce back to easily, in close proximity.

20

Quentin and Penny wind up together in this one.

It’s very strange.

21 

Kady fucks up this one again. Jane decides to try to keep Kady out of Fillory.

22

This is a Julia and Margo, Quentin and Eliot timeline. They make cute Kings and Queens. Jane wishes they’d stop accidentally starting wars.

Margin finds it hilarious when they do, though, so he usually lets them live a little bit longer in those.

23 

Julia and her fucking heroic sacrifices. 

Quentin dies anyway, torn apart shade and all.

24

Jane starts experimenting with adding people into their incestuous little group.

They reject them like foreign tissue in their bodies. 

25

Josh hardly ever makes a difference whether they find him in the Nietherlands or not, but in this one he manages to nearly bring Ember to their side with little cakes.

Doesn’t work, but Jane is impressed and decides trying to pull him in more often.

26

They ALL go crazy in this one. God, together they’re worse than Martin.

27

Jane puts her foot down in this one. She’s mad at them all for the last one.

She throws Margo and Eliot out into the world early by getting them expelled. She sends Penny to the Library. She throws Kady to Marina’s mercy.

She pushes Quentin, Julia, and Alice together as hard as she can.

Cute threesome. Not so helpful in the fight.

28

Jane keeps Marina at Brakebills, despite Fogg’s protests. She kind of wants to see what influence one of the most powerful Magicians out of Brakebills will have.

Marina sleeps with all the girls and then tries to take over Fillory.

Oops.

29

Jane tries something a bit drastic.

She transplants Q into Alice’s house.

Oh boy, if Q was messed up before.

Quentin and Alice are disasters and they barely make it past their trials. They both die trying to save Charlie. 

30

Jane tries to put a spell on Ted, make him a bit more present, a bit tougher on Quentin so he grows stronger.

It’s not her area of expertise in magic and she messes it up and Ted turns into a monster. Jane feels terribly.

The remnants of her spell linger across timelines and give him the cancer he cannot beat.

31

Margo is Janet again. Jane pushes her a little harder to see if she breaks. Janet gets stronger. Excellent.

But she accidentally makes the one timeline where Eliot and Margo/Janet aren’t friends. That goes wrong very quickly. Without each other, they’re lost.

And, ultimately, useless.

32

Messing with Penny truly never works out. They die before getting to Fillory when Jane tries to effect Penny’s Traveler training.

33

Jane finds out that Mayakofsky has known about the timeloops the whole time, he’s just been ignoring them.

“What the fuck is the use of time loops when they’re all pointless little shits?”

34

Jane tries to cast Quentin out into the cold, deny him Brakebills. See if he gets stronger from it.

Julia tries to help him, tries to appeal his case. Jane stops it from working.

Quentin kills himself three months later.

35

Removing Kady from Brakebills does essentially nothing. Jane was pretty sure that would happen anyway.

36

Eliot dies without Margo at Brakebills.

37

Kicking Alice out into the world doesn’t even work. She just breaks in with her alumni key. Jane decides to keep denying her the test, just because it sets Alice on a more wily path from the start.

38

Eliot dies without Brakebills. A lot of dying going on with the High King of Fillory.

39 

Penny teleports into the ocean without training and suffocates.

40 

Julia’s turn out in the cold.

Things move faster than ever, are more brutal early on. Jane dies.

 No more time loops.


End file.
